The classroom for visual journalism
A new year, new good habits to embrace
The end of 2008 was full of technical snafus for me. There were problems with my blog and my laptop. Not fun. I'm glad everything is working again.
It's amazing how much havoc a corrupt Spotlight preference file can cause. My laptop would not boot. But I did not panic, at first, because I'm always making back-ups of my projects and photos. (One dead hard drive years ago taught me a lesson.) Then I remembered — I had not back-up my iTunes files in quite at while. All my recent music purchases could be gone! UGH! And there was no excuse. Backing-up iTunes is so easy. (Look under: File>Library>Back-up to Disc, then start feeding your computer CD or DVD-ROM discs.) Thank goodness, all the IT tech needed to do was throw away the Spotlight preference file. My laptop was fine with no data loss. And my music was safe.
So here are some GOOD back-up and file management tips.
I keep my latest multimedia projects on a Flash drive that I carry home. This has saved me a trips back to work on weekends or late at night when someone discovers a correction everyone else overlooked. I can make the correction at home, send the file in either via FTP or e-mail to the weekend or night staff.
I also have a Flash drive with Photoshop tools (brushes, actions, shapes), Adobe software workspace settings, Flash templates, actions scripts, phone numbers, etc.... If I need to work at a different computer, I can be comfortably working at it in a short period of time.
You also can keep a copy of your Web browser bookmarks on the Flash drive or use social bookmarking sites like delicious.com or Magnolia. I love using delicious to share sites or access them on my iPod Touch.
Keep dated copies of big Flash projects. This has saved me when a Flash file has become corrupt or if I have messed up an action script. Once I made a mistake making a change on a very complicated audio action script and all the many audio clips started playing all once. After trying to debug the code for two hours, I simply went back to the previous days' version, was much more careful when I updated the script and made the deadline.
And always back-up your iTunes files. Who can work without music?
It's amazing how much havoc a corrupt Spotlight preference file can cause. My laptop would not boot. But I did not panic, at first, because I'm always making back-ups of my projects and photos. (One dead hard drive years ago taught me a lesson.) Then I remembered — I had not back-up my iTunes files in quite at while. All my recent music purchases could be gone! UGH! And there was no excuse. Backing-up iTunes is so easy. (Look under: File>Library>Back-up to Disc, then start feeding your computer CD or DVD-ROM discs.) Thank goodness, all the IT tech needed to do was throw away the Spotlight preference file. My laptop was fine with no data loss. And my music was safe.
So here are some GOOD back-up and file management tips.
I keep my latest multimedia projects on a Flash drive that I carry home. This has saved me a trips back to work on weekends or late at night when someone discovers a correction everyone else overlooked. I can make the correction at home, send the file in either via FTP or e-mail to the weekend or night staff.
I also have a Flash drive with Photoshop tools (brushes, actions, shapes), Adobe software workspace settings, Flash templates, actions scripts, phone numbers, etc.... If I need to work at a different computer, I can be comfortably working at it in a short period of time.
You also can keep a copy of your Web browser bookmarks on the Flash drive or use social bookmarking sites like delicious.com or Magnolia. I love using delicious to share sites or access them on my iPod Touch.
Keep dated copies of big Flash projects. This has saved me when a Flash file has become corrupt or if I have messed up an action script. Once I made a mistake making a change on a very complicated audio action script and all the many audio clips started playing all once. After trying to debug the code for two hours, I simply went back to the previous days' version, was much more careful when I updated the script and made the deadline.
And always back-up your iTunes files. Who can work without music?
Tags: file management, social bookmarking, tips
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1 Comment
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Comment by Robb Montgomery on January 6, 2009 at 1:54pm - All apologies for your blog downtime. Lesson learned if Ning has wheel that rolls - no need to reinvent it! Thanks for this post!
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